The Settlement

Graham Williamson1.0

In which acclaimed documentarian Sergei Loznitsy discovers that running a farm involves a lot of farming.I never saw Maidan because I was skeptical about its fashionably-slow approach; given that the war in the Crimea is the most seismic thing to happen to Europe since the Balkan conflict, isn't it kind of an abnegation of the documentarian's responsibility to just point a camera at it and invite everyone to coo at the long takes? Eventually I convinced myself I was being too harsh on a film I hadn't seen, but good lord The Settlement makes the Harvard Ethnographic Film Unit look like Adam Curtis. There is an interesting story here, about contact with nature as a form of therapy, but Loznitsy is completely uninterested in telling it, and if he was going for a simple pastoral effect his sound mix manages the job better than his images. Just rotten.

Arthur4.5

السبب الحقيقي الذي يجعلني أدافع عن الأعمال الوثائقية هو أنه كل شيء سوف تراه حقيقي وهذه الأعمال تجعلك تدرك الذي لم تدركه، بهذا الفيلم سوف ترى أشخاص محاصرون في جنونهم والألم يقتلهم لمدة ساعة ونصف تقريباً، الفيلم يعتبر صامت بهذه الطريقة الفيلم أحببته أكثر وأكثر أنت ياعزيزي تخيل فيلم ساعة ونصف صامت تشاهد أشخاص محاصرون فقط تسمع خطواتهم، والسبب الثاني الذي جعلني أحب الفيلم وهو ذكرني بفيلم وايزمان "تيتيكت" الفيلم الذي أعتبره واحد من أعظم الأفلام وأعظم بداية لمخرج، فهذا الفيلم لا يختلف عن فيلم تيتيكت كلاهمها يصورون نفس الجنون والحصار

Puffin4.0

I like to think the reason I'm such an apologist for these early Loznitsa films is because they carry this mood like they were dug up from the middle of nowhere and carry some dark secret beneath the surface. And yeah, okay, maybe going for the rural farm life of psychiatric patients will automatically carry with it some fucking cryptic context for those of us on the outside looking in... not to mention Loznitsa's unspoken intentions with these early pictures feeling more insidious as his career garners more questions with time. That said, he knows how to shut up and leave things to their more affecting and meaningful ambiguity. My own idea of what The Settlement envisions or represents might very well be entirely different from the director's own ideas, but the self-imposed mystery of its purpose is what captivates me more than deciphering the puzzle to some answer that might mean less or perhaps even feel ill-conceived. I like that I don't know what he meant, and I like that his aesthetic subverts easy interpretation rather than leaning toward analysis - whether that be analysis in favor of what I think or not. Because even if it were saying something I thought were poignant, that 80 minute runtime might make the whole thing redundant. Leaving things to chance is, in my opinion, the smarter choice.Though I pray this film is never found by melodramatic video essayists. To make these things more than mundane, or to act like the mundanity isn't an essential aspect to whatever path it seeks to take, is a little silly in my eyes. I also concede that, to the interpretation of this being an especially pessimistic or even apocalyptic film, I refer to Graham Williamson's one-star review: "In which acclaimed documentarian Sergei Loznitsy discovers that running a farm involves a lot of farming." And honestly, if I thought this film were more intentionally bleak, my rating would more closely resemble Williamson's - for that exact reason described. But the revelations here are thankfully subjective and silent enough that it avoids my usual grievances with the moodier side of documentary filmmaking.